


jadidang hridayang

by toujours_nigel



Category: Mahabharata - Vyasa
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Polygamy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-05
Updated: 2016-03-05
Packaged: 2018-05-24 20:14:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,346
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6165408
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toujours_nigel/pseuds/toujours_nigel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Panchali allows Karna to loose his arrow at the target.</p>
            </blockquote>





	jadidang hridayang

Before they depart Vrishali says, “She is the most beautiful woman in the world,” and bends closer to the dasi who is taking his uttariyas and packing them away, in a cedar chest and nudges her shoulder with a painted foot and says something, low-voiced, about satchets of fragrance.

Regardless of caste Vrishali came from one palace to another, wedding him, and has around servants a trick of benevolent indifference that comes hard to him who has grown up amidst servants and was counted one as many years as she has lived. 

“I will not seek her hand if it will hurt you,” he ventures, and waits to see if he has fallen short of the mark. This wife of four years is a mystery to him still, possessed of an alien serenity and, sure in herself, unwilling to expend effort in pleasing others, oft careless of appearances. A son and a daughter and long nights in bed have not rid them of this distance though she pleases his heart and hungry ambitions. With Suyodhan, with whom he spends still most of his days, he is far easier.

“I want you to prove yourself the best archer in aryavart,” she answers, and moves to dismiss the dasi and seat herself on his thigh, her arms entwined around his neck. “I want all the princes and all the kings and all the world to glory in my Vrisha’s skills as I glory in them, and I want you to bring home Panchali as your just reward, and I want her in our home, serving your parents as I do, serving you as I do.”

Some days he is proudest of this, that he obeyed his father and wed this woman who enters into his plans, into his storied ambitions, as though they were her own. “You want her for a sister?”

She laughs, clear as a temple bell, and with enough merriment that she calls up a smile in him, that he has to put an answering arm about her waist to hold her to him. “No,” she gasps, and kisses his brow to silence herself, her lips trembling against his skin. “No,” she says again at length, and presses her fingers to his mouth for silence, “my dearest lord, my bull among warriors. She is the most beautiful woman in the world. I want her for my wife.”

 

Panchali is terribly young. Her they will not see unveiled till they vie for her hand in marriage, but her twin, hurried home from Dronacharya’s school to bid his sister farewell, is a raw youth of eighteen whose talents far outstrip his control and who might be seen three days of the seven shooting at bales of hay mounted in the approximation of a man while Aswathama critiques his stance. Then, too, he remembers his father returning some day from Panchal bearing news of a second daughter born to King Drupad: only to a minor queen, but twins were notable in any household, and to a servant one princess had been much the same as another. 

He had been sixteen then, and ever hopefully skirting the edges of Kripacharya’s school where the sons of generals and ministers learnt use of weaponry. The Pandavas had still been in their mountain fastness, the ailing Pandu alive, and Suyodhan an enchanting boy of ten who visited the royal stables to imperiously cadge rides. It was no part of a prince’s training to sit a horse and take it galloping and he knows now as he had suspected then that the illicit thrill of it formed much of its pleasure. They had been friends long before his sudden elevation to royalty: rank counting for little among the horses and less when countered by Suyodhan’s reckless charm and impetuous demands of intimacy. He had been twenty when Pandu succumbed to capricious fate, twenty-one when Dronacharya began to teach the princes, and twenty-one still when refused further training, he had left his parents weeping behind and sought other masters. On that morning Suyodhan, fifteen and murderously lovely to his eye, had straddled Karn’s left thigh and lifted his chin in mute demand, and they had spoken little and ridden not a jot. It had taken him half the morning, after, to soothe the startled horses, eaten into hours when he should have been travelling. Suyodhan, when he returned, had been twenty-five and masterful, roiling with plans to retain the Elephant Throne of Hastinapur, and this little princess, when they sought to kill or capture her father, and she found herself given over to a greater queen as daughter in the wake of defeat, must have been all of fourteen: a novice in womanly graces and longing still for the wild games of childhood.

Yet word of beauty spreads as the wafting fragrance of a thousand lotuses, and he finds himself at thirty-four, a little king, far outweighed in wealth and age and power. The sons of great kings have come hunting for this bride, and their father have come with them to bring them a new mother. Old wolves all, grey in the muzzle, hunting this bright young spark with their yearling cubs. The Kaurava princes, peers to her many brothers and their rivals four short years ago, are among the youngest vying for her hand, and the youngest of them scant years her senior: Vikarna a gangling twenty, Vindha and Anuvindha nineteen and only grateful to be unaccompanied by Acharya Drona.

Himself he finds in the strange solitude that has grown in four years familiar: a king and not their own, a kshatriya and tainted by the stables, a warrior too noted to be ignored and too low to bring into circles of great, immediate intimacy. He refuses the courteous invitations to dice and wine and women, and Suyodhan, swarmed by brothers and fear, speaks to him little and less, and by the morning of their third day in Kampilya, with kings and mendicants pouring still over the borders into Panchal, he has grown enough possessive of a spreading aswattha behind the Shakti temple that he startles at approaching sound.

Vasudev smiles upon him, turns to his companion and proclaims, “Look how we are forestalled. Well met, Angaraj. Yours is valour that would have been missed.”

“If you are seeking Panchali, my lord, we had best all surrender and feast your wedding.” 

Nothing he has seen of the world has been so charming as Krishn’s smile that gladdens the senses. “A flatterer! Your skill at archery leaves you well able, my lord, to praise lesser powers, but this day I am beyond courtesy. You may at will ignore me, I rank solely among spectators. Come, Shikhandi, we will seek some other shade.”

 

On the fifth morning, when the assembled kings, brooking no further delays, and vastly suspicious of the absence of the Narayani Sena from Krishn’s retinue, demand that the bow and the prize be set out, Karn spends eight dandas in agony and then another ten frustrated. Not one of these greats but is behaving like a boy of twelve first bending a bow to win a smile from another: all wild bravado and not a jot of caution. The bow is a grand thing, well-fit for the gods and too vast in the curved grip to be comfortably spanned by mortal hand, and from nock to nock taller than many who seek to wield it: to lift such a thing above one’s head and pierce a target swift-moving and seen only in clear water is a task well-worthy the prize scornfully appraising the royal failures. 

A beautiful girl, half his age or a little more, who will adorn any palace she inhabits and Suyodhan covets for Hastinapur: eyes like lotus buds tightly furled, set in an oval face above an aquiline nose and pursed mouth, everything in her blossoming. In ten years she will be formidable, and already about the lift of her eyebrow, the flash of her eye, the curl of her mouth, there plays evidence of a sharp tongue and sharper wit. Such a woman as one might win a war for, or lose one to, and nothing to him.

Yet he finds himself wishing failure for the men who take up the weapon, or attempt it. The eldest and most powerful have first ventured onto the field and to be the littlest queen, prized for quick-passing beauty and swarmed by sons and sons-in-law older than she would scarce suit the fire-sprite turning at each failure to whisper to her twin. Perhaps the bow is bent to her will, and recalcitrant in the hands of those she in her heart refuses, perhaps they have gone too long without blood-rage lighting their minds in battle, but all of them fail, the grandees and great kings, before the sun is at the zenith.

Among the young princes he feels an exhausted preceptor and about the men of his own age angry. They are all something in excess: too foolhardy, or too anxious, or too sure of themselves. Not a one but has handles all his life weapons cut to his hand, and not a one but treats this bow as he would his own. They fail, they fall, the bow falls from their hands.

He grips Suyodhan close and whispers instructions, but nobody can teach patience to a leaping lion, and the arrow goes wide. With the other princes he has hope of little and less, none of them an archer save Anuvindha who is too young yet to manage the great weight of the bow, who uses the short sword and daggers in close combat. Almost he misses Arjun, the glory of him in battle, the snake-swiftness with which he nocks an arrow and speeds it unerring to the target. He has heard much in later years of the eye of the clay pigeon and seen him glorious in display and seen the wounds he bestows in battle. To watch him now would be a balm to wearying eyes.

As the light brightens and dims and the line of waiting kings dwindles to third sons and nephews and him, Prince Dhrishtadyumna steps around his sister, luminous in his armour, and asks, jesting, mocking, whether with all the braves of aryavart assembled, his sister must yet go unwed.

“If you will let the best of archers languish while unformed youths struggle under the weight of the weapon, is it not a deserved fate?” Suyodhan is ever eager to mark the distinction, between Karn and others, between himself and others in befriending Karn.

“The best archer in aryavart,” Dhrishtadyumna says with a gravity belying his years, “is dead, Prince Suyodhan. Your friend is valiant no doubt, yet do you ask us to bestow Panchali on a Souta whom you have elevated?”

In the cold of his mind where the archer lives Karn is thinking already of what support he might glean, and what a fool he was to forget, and what a child, in what mind these princes hold him. Aloud he says, “Arjun is dead, and nobody may know now which of us would best the other. My birth barred me from competing with him, and in his short years we were never at war. I do not seek to resurrect that quarrel here. But I have come when called, so you must answer this. Have you brought me from Anga here, O Prince, the better to insult me? You are yet young, and from Acharya Drona you might have found encouragement to so speak and so act, yet in politics one must use derision as a subtler weapon, or find soon one’s folly, as did your father in speaking to your preceptor.”

Children. He is reduced to bandying words with children. How immoderately Vrishali would laugh. Yet a cheer goes up from among the kings, and Vasudev moves swiftly forward to speak in the ear of the King. Yet he sits, and the boys do battle with the bow, not a one rising with it, not a one bending it back and nocking the string. Perhaps they have Krishn held in reserve and mean to present him the girl and declare him the best of the kshatriyas of aryavart. Perhaps they mean not to wed her at all. Perhaps they are awaiting some prince from over the seas, some god or the son of one, some yaksha or some rishi clad in dharmagni: some young Parashuram. Many such are, and nobody will call a princeling Souta, whatever his caste. It would bring power rushing to Drupad’s red right arm, invest him with righteous glory and elevate his house.

In the waning light Panchali stands, whispers to her brother and her father, and Drupad laughs and sighs, gestures Dhrishtadyumna into speech.

“My sister says,” says the prince, abdicating responsibility, “that it would be a pity in such a race to hobble a stallion for mere appearance. Angaraj,” he brings his palms together, bows over them. “My Lord, we would watch your skill.”

In his hands the bow sings, burnished wood gleaming, the bowstring snapping whistling into place, the arrows long as his torso perfectly balanced. To hold its weight above his head strains arms, and to stare at the water to spot the fleeting gleam of the fish beyond the whirling blades strains eyes, and Panchali’s look on him steady as a far-seeing sailor’s is a strain to his heart. In battles he has been calmer. Yet the bow sings in his hands, skill to skill, desire to desire, and the arrow he fleets upwards finds its way to the eye of the fish, and its shaft falls showering about him, splintered by the blades.

The kings roar approval, the brahmins wave their uttariyas banner-like in the air, and when he looks up Panchali meets his gaze and holds it.

 

Panchali comes golden to him. In daylight she is dark, an eternal shadow arresting the eye, in darkness, in lamplight a living flame, golden at wrist and ankle and waist and throat and ear: crowned with gold, clad in it. On the dais in the great hall, in daylight with all eyes upon her she had been beautiful, lissome and flower-crowned, yet human still. In the perfumed darkness of their marital chamber she is a goddess. If golden-fingered Usha had come from Aditya’s bed to his, he could scarcely have felt it more.

Then she steps into the light of the great lamps and he can see her eyes. Just so Dhrishtadyumna looked when first he strove against Aswathama; just so he has seen many men look, and some women, but only on the eve of battle when the conch-shell has sounded and the body is taut with terror and the mind with desperate valour.

“My kshatriyani,” he says, and steps back, steps away, leaves the path clear between her and the great door, her and the great bed. “There is no battle between us.”

“I would not fight you, arya. We are joined in all our lives.”

He has taken battlefield surrenders that have rung with greater sincerity. My goddess girl, he thinks, and then with irrepressible fondness, my little one. “If they want blood they may have mine,” he offers, and when she stares adds, “when I first married they wanted to inspect the bed on the morrow; it was my blood then too.”

She frowns a little, the perfect face crumpling at the brow. “I do not think they will ask, and I’m well capable of shedding my own blood in such a moment. I’m your wife, lord, no child you need to protect.”

“We do not usually give children in marriage,” he agrees, matching her solemnity. “Bhadre, I am fearful if you are not. I rose at dawn and in too few dandas Usha will make her way again across the sky, and that was no weapon for human hands. I am no creature fit for a virgin’s bed tonight.”

“I am not fearful,” she says, “if you are,” and comes forward to lay her right hand on his left, touch the calluses of years of handling bows, the red welts raised by the afternoon. “Had I not wanted you, I would have let the insult stand.”

So close he can see the girl beneath the goddess, the sweat beading at her temples, the hair crimping as it dries. There is gold threaded in through her hair, too, beneath the ratnavali, and gold dusted over the dusk of her cheeks. How afraid they must have been, to armour her so, how ill she must think of him. How young she is. Yet if he had won, she would have gone even to Maharaj Jarasandh. “Tonight we will divest ourselves of our panoply and sleep as even soldiers must,” he temporises, turns her hand over to draw fingers across her palm, “and tomorrow, Indrani, we may join battle together. Do I amuse you?”

She closes her mouth on a smile, and explains, “It is a new name.”

“You are dark as a storm cloud.”

“All my life I have been the shadow to my brothers’ sun, and now I am yours. Is your wife fair?”

“Vrishali is the colour of ripe wheat in the sun,” he answers, and presses a bangle of gold wire lightly into her forearm, “like gold in firelight. She will look just so against your skin, golden-fair, luminous.” The fear is in her eyes again, and he smiles to draw it like poison from a wound. “I am grown fanciful as a child,” he says, and turns from her.

There is a trick to sleeping armoured as he is. The kavach does not gleam as bright in the dark, lies closer to his skin--a smooth carapace well-fitted like the hull on some horned beetle, without the graven affectations of princely panoply--but even so he is twice-shelled, unmistakable, a thing for war. Vrishali pushes him from bed of nights, claiming he is too warm to the touch, or too cool, and Suyodhan’s bed he has always left as a matter of course. What few courtesans he had in his youth afforded had not the means to entertain a single man all night but that he paid better than a charioteer or itinerant soldier. Doubtless Panchali, too, will push him out from her bed in time, but the bed in this chamber can easily sleep four, and perhaps has: this night she ought not be disturbed overmuch. He lays his sword on the cedar chest that has come with him from Anga, and unclasps his belt to set it atop, and knots his paridhan closer about his waist, and uncoils the upavit from about his neck,. the ushnis from his head, and sheds his greaves, his angad, and lets them clattering down. When he turns, as bare as he chooses this night to be, Panchali is staring wide-eyed at him.

“I did not think to find the rumours true,” she says, and places a golden hand on his chest, rising with his breath. “Are you thus armoured everywhere?”

“To strike below the waist is unmannerly in war,” he reminds her, and draws to arms-length, her hand clasped again in his.

She is the colour of a lamp-lit night, and in this lamp-lit night burnished. Karnaphul of carnelian hang from vines of gold at her ears, and the satlari kantha and lambanam bound with phalakahara obscure her from neck to navel, in their way a kavach as secure as his. Her hands sport many rings, and her arms hang under the weight of kangan, valaya, keyura, angad. They have sent him a kshatriyani indeed.

“You are god-touched,” she informs him, grave as a scholar. “I am glad for it.”

“Does it leaven my low birth for you?” He wishes it back having uttered the words, it is no night for such answers.

“It leaves me in the right in an argument with my preceptor,” she says, and turns her hand to clasp fingers about his bare wrist, the beads of her kangan clinking in his grasp. “How warm you are yet.”

“You are a philosopher?”

“I use what tools I am let. In childhood sword and shield as well as any, these four years wit and beauty.”

If they had not waged war against her father, if Arjun had not captured him, if he had not surrendered half his lands, she might have grown to womanhood with weapons in her hands, calluses on her pink-lotus palms, met him some day in battle, driven his chariot as the women of Madradesh do for their brothers and their husbands, or gone herself to war as do the hill-women of Manipur. “If you wish to take up arms again I would serve gladly as your preceptor. And while I can promise you no court philosopher, you may match wits any day with Kripacharya when we are at Hastinapur, or with Mahamati Vidur.”

“Are you often at Hastinapur, even with your kingdom waiting?”

“As Acharya Drona is, and with better cause. We are a wooded place, mountain country rife with elephants, watered by the Ganga. The people grow enough, even in bad years, to feed themselves. but not very much more. We trade elephants to the Kurus, and sandalwood trees, and they give gold to us for it, and trade crisp cotton and muslin so fine a yard of it can be balled up in a man’s fist. I fight in her battles and she throws a ring of soldiers about my borders and laps us in luxuries.”

“And you would go did he none of this, for Prince Suyodhan is your friend,” she says, laughing. “I have seen that light in other eyes, arya, and that beard does little to obscure your smile.”

“Prince Suyodhan is my friend,” he agrees, “and Mahishi Gandhari allows my Vrishali all the honours due a queen. It is a rare thing, Princess, for such as we. We will sleep now. Shall I summon a dasi to divest you, or will you slumber in all your gauds?”

She hesitates, worries her lower lip between her teeth. To call in the servants will lead to gossip that she has spurned him in the last, or been spurned. Every other night a dasi or a company of them, but tonight these duties ought be his. “If I essay it, you will surely mock my ineptitude.”

“You can scarcely be worse than my brother, and he used to garb me for combat,” she says, and lays her wrist between his hands.

He lets it drop and takes her uttariya instead, lays it on the bare half of the cedar chest and then taking her hand between his again, draws the rings from her laden fingers, the kangan and valaya from her arms, and sets them on the bright cloth. Her arms are marked by the metal, and cold from it, and her skin prickles where he sets hands on her, and she shivers when he unclasps the keyura from her upper arms, slips the curl of the angad over her bicep and down. He takes the flowers from her ears, unhooks the vines from her hair and turns her carefully, ghosting his hand at her neck.

At the back she is bare to the waist but for the heavy counterweights of her pectoral, winking sapphire. He kneels to unclasp the manjira from her feet. draws them away and flings them, bells ringing, onto the heap of ornaments, straightening unclasps her mekala, fists a hand in the chain of the counterweights, and rising unclasps them from about her neck, letting the chains pool in his hand and stoops again to set it like a gleaming serpent upon the floor. A weighty thing, to wear so much gold, but the phalaka render it impermeable, near as good against a dagger as some more unsubtle armour. Against a spear-thrust it would not serve, nor against a sword, nor a fleet arrow. Toy armour, to evoke it in dance or play. She is bare now to the waist, and shudders when he drops a kiss where her shoulder meets her arm and another where it meets her neck.

He stands back a step and takes the ratnavali from her head, unclasps the chudamani of carnaline and sapphire and pearl from the heavy knot of her hair. Unpinned and uncoiled her hair hangs to her hips, a dense mass threaded through with gold. “Panchali,” he says, and cards his fingers through the darkness, “will you turn for me?”

They are yet too close together for her to glance at him, but she turns her head within the veiling hair and bows it. Denuded of her jewellery she is blue-gold, fragrance rising from her skin in the heat of the shuttered room, and to his eyes a thing of some small marvel. Her eyes are swallowing wide and her parted lips are painted the scarlet of her nipples. He had been wrong to call her Usha even in his own mind, too attuned to Vrishali in his bed and in his thoughts. The night stands before him in a woman’s lithe body, garbed in red, and longing.

“You are the only creature fit for my bed,” she tells him and steps yet closer to sink a hand in his hair and tip his face down to hers. “Tonight and all nights,” she says, and presses her mouth to his brow, his shuttering eyes, his hungering mouth.

Pressed together there is a discrepancy between their heights too vast to vanish simply with him leaning down to her. She leans against him, leans up, unbalanced on her pointed toes and kisses his mouth again, winds her hands tighter in his hair, and laughs when he puts an arm around her back and another behind her thighs and swings her up into his arms.

 

In the morning Sushashan looks at him and crows with laughter. “O look,” he calls, “what tigress has mauled our bull!”


End file.
